Travis "Sharkbite" Reece
Freak of the Wastelands
Standing nearly nine feet tall, Travis’ height is nothing extraordinary for a troll. His ragged brown leather duster and home-repaired clothes only serve to mark him as a lone denizen of the wastes – not a city-dweller. His dense musculature and dermal armor simply mean he’s a troll with a tough life of wilderness survival.
His face is what makes him a mutant and an outcast. His mouth is unusually wide and full of row upon row of sharp serrated teeth – just like a shark. His head, neck, and shoulders are covered with rough grey scales that overlap and make his mottled hide look like that of his name-sake. His eyes look like that of some feral animal – golden all the way across, with vertical slit pupils.
He carries a small collection of found and home-made spears for hunting, and wears a necklace of shark teeth his mother made using his own teeth.
His mother lived in Sunken New Orleans selling herbal remedies and trinkets to the residents – until Travis was born. Fearful of her mutant child, the residents drove her out into the wilderness – where her knowledge of plants and animals sustained her and the child.
As Travis grew, his physical monstrosity became yet more evident as he grew row upon row of razor-sharp teeth that shed and renewed themselves with alarming regularity. His mother continued to care for him lovingly – even making him a necklace of his teeth to show him how they grew in size as he did.
She didn’t neglect his education – even withstanding the harsh looks and prejudice of returning to town to buy books with which to teach him to read and write. He learned that and a lot more from her – even how to hunt, and hunt exceedingly well.
He trades with the few travelers who pass through his neck of the swamp, selling hides and food in return for useful metal objects and worked cloth to patch his clothes. Lately, though, he’s begun to yearn for meta-human company beyond his now-elderly mother and the increasingly-rare traders. Ghouls and slavers have made the routes through ‘his’ swamp more and more dangerous, making the few traders he relies upon even more rare.
He’s finally resolved to come out of the swamp – regardless of what the town-dwellers will call him.